Burning Man and the John Muir Trail - two wild weeks to top off the bestest summer

The Gate Road Pregame

I open my eyes. The light is the pale blue of the early morning, before the sun has begun its ascent. No, bluer than that, as blue as it can only be when it’s raining. I hear drips dropping onto the windshield of our car. I look around me and see we haven’t moved an inch since the last few times I woke up. We’re surrounded by other sleeping cars. We’re in a 14 lane wide traffic jam. I remember the number from last night, carefully winding off a mental thread to find my way back from a pee excursion. We are stranded with tens of thousands of cars in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, because of rain. But I’m still too tired to contemplate the bizarreness of the situation. I close my eyes again.

The next time I wake up, life is stirring. People are clomping around on the desert floor, which has turned into a colossal mud flat overnight. The very alkaline Black Rock Desert was once the floor of a Pleistocene lake. Wet, it remembers its ancient past and gets nostalgic and clingy, caking onto your shoes till the sheer weight pulls them clean off your feet. The gate to Black Rock City was closed at 6AM, to protect the wet desert surface from getting ripped apart under the weight of moving cars. By this time, we’d been inching through the desert night for five straight hours. This year’s theme is Caravansary. How fitting. In the morning people are grumpy, exhausted and bummed about being caught just outside the gate to Burning Man. But as the day wears on, people resign to their fate and switch over to what humans are so good at: adapting. They bust out kites and bikes and camping chairs. They introduce themselves to their neighbors, go for walks along the car caravan which stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, and climb on top of their vehicles to bask in the sun. One RV nearby hoist their stereo installation onto the roof and start up a full blown dance party. People swarm in from all directions. Burning Man has already started. The Gate Road Pregame.

At the end of that day, a good 24 hours after we started our journey, we pass by the Greeters, and find our camp in the dark. Miles was in a different car, so waiting for him, Gabe and I go exploring. We climb onto a giant carrot top shaped dome, and a wild scene unfolds itself below us: utter darkness, were it not for the vast sea of bright flickering neon lights, a total traffic anarchy of people and bikes going crisscross in all directions, interspersed with giant Dragon art cars, pirate ships on wheels and poof ball golf carts. Loud beats and noises blending into one big cacophony. Utter kaleidoscopic chaos, a fluorescent apocalyptic dreamscape. Where are we…

Dual experience

We’re camped on the outermost street of the circular Black Rock City, in the walk-in camping. Perfect spot. It emphasizes the duality of the Burning Man experience. On our left, there’s the sickest multiplicity of parties of our lives, the crazy social experiment of the Black Rock City, a temporary society made up of 70,000 eccentrics that unleash their wildest fantasy and imagination onto the bare desert floor. The Black Rock City never sleeps, never takes a breather, it pumps and fumes and raves all day and all night long. On our right hand side, there’s nothing. Desert. Distant mountains and blazing sunsets and porta potties a quarter mile away (so we share a pee bucket right outside our tent). The Festival of Festivals though it may be, Burning Man is also the largest Leave No Trace event in the world, founded on respect for the desert’s ecosystem, and based on principles of complete self-reliance. All three of us are ‘virgin Burners’, but I’m camping with two seasoned outdoor adventurers, and we’re crushing it, out there in walk-in, figuring everything out all by ourselves. We got plenty water, amazing backcountry meals, two of each of the backpacking necessities: camping stoves, first aid kits, pocket knives…

While roaming the streets and plains of the festival, your primary needs are constantly on the back or forefront of your mind. You can’t carry enough water not to feel perpetually dehydrated. And then there’s the glaring sun, compelling you to always be on the lookout for shade shelter and nap spots. Life is water, food, shelter, dancing your brains out, rest, repeat. And then the Playa dust, which gets into everything. Since we set up our geodesic dome on the very outskirts of the city, with not enough fabric to cover the whole structure, we are one with the dust. It cracks your feet and lips and gives you a clogged and bloody nose for the entire duration of the event. Try combining partying like you’ve never partied with confronting your own immediate survival. Quite the experience. It pulled me right into the moment and didn’t let me go until I was well a ways away from the sweltering swirling desert flats.

Unlocking the Playa

But despite the acuteness of the moment, it took me some time to tune in to this gigantic magical madhouse, find the mental portal that would lead me in. As a newcomer, you look around at this swirling insane merry-go-round and wonder, ‘What do you want from me?’ The thing to realize is that the people themselves make the festival. There are no main stages, no line up, no central programming of any kind. All it is are camps of participants that organize their own fun, and invite everyone. And there are many, many camps. The potential for adventures is infinite, and the course of your wanderings is as erratic as a hoverfly on acid. You have to resign to the fact that you will never come close to getting a fraction of it all in. That’s one of the main reasons I think why people keep coming back. I felt it: ‘I missed the Great Butterfly Migration and the cross-Playa Unicorn Stampede!’, or ‘I didn’t have a tutu for TuTuTuesday!’, and ‘They had a ballpit? I’ve been missing those in my life ever since they kicked me out of the one in IKEA because I was ‘too big’!’ But that’s its nature: there’s enough crazy shit going on to provide 70,000 people with a unique experience, a unique trail of zany sights and play sessions. I myself, a little bug in this whirling anthill, had such a great time with my collection of moments. Gradually, with the help of a little medication, the Playa unlocked itself to me and I sank right in. My favorite place was Deep Playa. It was the vast dusty expanse behind the Man where the line between reality and the dream world, as well as the horizon, blurs. It’s the place where by day I choked in dusty white outs, found free ice cream stands in the depths of my overheating, stumbled upon giant hammocks, mutant bikes materializing from the dust, and stray hair dryer chairs. It’s the place where at night I swerved from thumping dance parties on towering pirate ships suddenly looming overhead, to a ‘Hug Deli’ in the middle of nowhere, to an amazing live funk show on a portable porch far out in the dark nothingness that every last person in the audience had just happened upon in their wanderings, to a revolving, human powered steel globe that evoked the ecstatically wide-eyed, agile, tireless monkey in me, one of my very favorite alter egos. That’s one deep piece of my heart that the Playa gave back to me, and Gabe saw it: “You are a climber at heart.” That would make my family proud!

Burning Man is a larger than life tribute to and product of human imagination and creativity in its wildest freest form. People get to do something they’ve been missing most in their lives since society told them they were too old for it: pure unbridled PLAY! It was evident to me that if Burning Man was about anything at all, it would be that. People danced and frolicked and adventured and climbed in every little thing. There was a strong emphasis on lust and sexuality, but all so silly and innocently. From free spanking booths to workshops in arguing naked to genital puppetry camps. Haha! A giant summer camp for wayward children. In that respect, certainly, a dry and dusty paradise! The little moments did it for me: chasing MOOP (matter out of place) down across the expanse, howling at the sunset in a scattered choir of a dozen invisible voices every evening, me and Gabe pretend-tripping on our trike over an imaginary tripwire that two people on either side of the street were pulling taught.

Our crew

Gabe the risk-averse camp instructor, the well-spoken orator, the brilliant musician and bestest dance buddy. And Miles ‘get-your-shit-together’ Ryan, the dogged einzelgänger, the rugged mountain man. And me, Playa-named Sunset Moment, the excited monkey and ranting philosopher.

For an unexperienced trio that faced a number of obstacles to get here (finding our tickets 4 to 5 days before the start of Burning Man, car issues and a 24 hour long drive), camping together in a small geodome in the desert, we were an amazingly functional team. I loved waking up in between my boys, covered in white dust and the sunrise in my eyes, fixing up great breakfasts and dinners together, unplanned afternoon pit stops in the dome, our occasional little house meetings where we talked about feelings and adventure plans and where to store the car key. We struck a pretty ideal balance between letting each other free in doing our own thing and bonding over joint adventures. There were enough times spent roaming the vast city alone, with weird scenes left and right that popped your eyes and blew your mind every 10 feet. And enough time spent together in pairs, exploring the Playa or visiting jam sessions or parties or workshops on our blue two-person trike. And there were a few precious, colorful, crazy nights where the three of us stuck together and pedaled up and down the Playa from art car to art installation to dance party or Jazz café on both our trikes, circling round each other and freestyling and shouting and romping around, high as kites.

The Eternal Return

I owe that last title to Burn night. It was after the Man burned, and the enormous crowd had started dispersing across the hundreds of nightly raves and adventures. We had lost Miles, but our friend Dom, Gabe and I had wandered to where all the art cars blasting their music were lined up for the occasion in a large circle, enclosing the perimeter of the Man. Our dances became wilder and zanier as we hitched a ride down a freeway into the Playa state of mind, until the world was whizzing so fast we broke loose and skittered off into the dark of Deep Playa. We stumbled upon the large spinning globe again. Clambering in that thing swung outwards by the centrifugal force felt like thermal currents lifting you up by the wings. We scrambled off into the dark again, until Gabe called out, “The garden of galaxies!” I looked up, and sure enough, on large poles perched in the night sky, a dozen twinkling miniature galaxies, buoyant over our heads. We came upon a giant Lite-Brite, swirling star storm projections on the sand, and our own shrinking and stretching grinning shadows. But OH! adventure kept calling us on. “Onwards!” We moved along, but this time, looming at the horizon straight ahead, something caught my eye and mind that wouldn’t let go. As we approached the metamorphous lights, I saw spirals morph into parrots that morphed into monkeys and into cranes and into human shapes in such mesmerizing graceful fluid motions. What mid Playa mystery was this?

By the time we got close enough, the lights had been quenched and the movement had stopped. We saw people grouped around what looked like a large whirligig. It was a giant, 3D zoetrope of an acrobat swinging around a gymnastics bar. Circled underneath it were a number of old-looking dust-caked rowing machines. What were we supposed to do? “You have to row, that’ll turn it on!” someone in the crowd said. Some of us took place on the seats, while others stayed and watched from the sidelines. We rowed and rowed, but nothing happened. “You have to synchronize your movements! I’ve seen it work!” someone from amongst the spectators shouted. We tried syncing our movements, still nothing. Then all of a sudden, at a seemingly random moment, the strobe lights zapped on again, and the giant zoetrope geared into motion. We looked up. It looked absolutely magnificent from down below. “See! You did it!” Who said that? Why were they so sure? I felt wary. Something was off. It didn’t seem like we were making anything happen. Those handlebars weren’t attached to anything… I didn’t feel any resistance in my rowing seat. It was dark, and I couldn’t see it properly, but my suspicion grew steadily. I leaned over to Gabe. “Gabe! Someone’s messing with us! This doesn’t do anything, we’re just making a fool out of ourselves and the whole audience is in on it!” “No no! This works,” people kept assuring me. But my suspicion was headstrong, and I wouldn’t buy it. Some of us got up from our seats to inspect the axel. Sure enough, the cords coming from our rowing seats weren’t attached to anything. In some seats they were missing altogether, while in others, they were cut off halfway into the engine. “See! See!” I shouted. What kind of joke was this? I peered at the spectators. My suspicion was reaching fundamentalist proportions. Someone, perhaps all of them, were in on some conspiracy. I bolted towards them, shouting I wasn’t buying it. But every person I approached assured me they didn’t know how that thing worked, and that they thought we, the rowers, did. Two spectators came with me to inspect the engine again, in disbelief of my reports. The girl was just as puzzled as I was, and walked up and down with me, trying to figure out the mechanics. “See! There is someone in the audience with a remote control! Someone’s just pushing a button and sniggering at our plodding!” But none would come forward, and every person around me really looked as puzzled as me. The zoetrope behind us turned off again. Suddenly, it struck me, like lightning. I gasped. Wide-eyed, I gathered Dom, Gabe and the two spectators around. “I figured it out!!” I hissed. “There’s no-one with a remote control! No-one pushing a button! And we’re not doing anything either! It’s on a TIMER!!!” The realization sank into me with a loud clunk! and the momentousness and conviction of a revelation.

“But if it’s on a timer and the people aren’t the ones that power it, I would notice that if I stood here all day,” the spectator girl countered. “Aaah! BUT, have you been here all day? Noooo! See, no-one stays here all day. Once they’ve figured it out, people grow distracted and take off into the desert again!” And there, looming at the horizon of my consciousness and rushing towards me, was another revelation. Waves of understanding kept washing over me as I ranted on at my little audience of four. “It’s not about the art at all! It’s one big social experiment! It shows what happens when a group of people splits itself in two, the rowers and the spectators, and one half takes agency while the other half watches, and both halves think of the other that they know what they’re doing. The spectators are shouting instructions and encouragements from the sidelines, while the rowers have to believe that they’re making something happen, or else they’d just be making a fool of themselves! And as both sides convince themselves the others know what’s up, the aggregate of the whole group believe they’re in control. But then one person becomes suspicious, starts questioning their perceived control, and starts investigating, trying to figure out how this thing really works. Others join them, and the group slips into a new stage, the stage of critical thinking and asking questions. Then they discover they’re not in control at all! Their ropes aren’t attached to anything! In fact, they are severed at different levels, some early on, some deeper into the core of the machine, but all of them have been cut. That was the plan all along, all done to give us that illusion of control. It’s all a big joke! So the people become upset. Who’s fooling them?! Where’s the trickster?! Is it someone among them? Is it someone outside of them, who’s not immediately present? But no-one seems to know what’s going on, and they can’t find a culprit. By now, the two halves of the group are reunited once more in their collective search for answers. Then, all of a sudden, it hits one of them… No-one is in control. None of them, no third party amongst them, not even anyone outside of them. No-one. It just happens… with time… And as the group reaches this final revelation, this collective enlightenment, they rest their case and scatter off again into the dark night. And then a new group arrives, oblivious to the process of the previous group, and the whole process repeats itself!” “And get this,” Gabe interjects, “This art piece is called ‘The Eternal Return’, which is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that everything in history repeats itself into infinity…” “YES! Exactly! This is about existence itself! One after another, clouds of consciousness, entire universes, enter into the space-time dimension as the TIMER (get it?!) turns on, and go through the whole process of drawing up boundaries, naming, splitting apart into dualities, rowers/spectators, male/female, day/night, life/death, and so on. Then they fall under the illusion of control, but being the unruly rebels that humans are, they start questioning ‘Who’s got the remote control? Someone amongst us, someone outside of us? Is there a Jesus? Is there a God?!’ And they discover there’s no-one, life simply happens, and the trickster, that third party with the remote control, is as much of a fool as all of us, for as we thought Him up, He Himself started thinking He existed! He was tricked into existence!” That, right there, is the story of Samael, the blind god, who made the mistake of forgetting that He was a metaphor for the Unknowable, the Unnamable. And as He pronounced, “I am God”, by naming Himself, *poof* he negated Himself, and God was no more (thank you Joseph Campbell). “And with this final answer, they dissolve into the Original Unity again, fana, enlightenment, liberation from samsara, and float off into the dark void… And there comes another wave, and IN washes an entire new universe, oblivious to all the understanding, or even existence, of all its predecessors and successors, with no-one left to recount the infinite repetition of insights and revelations, and we’re back at the start!” This, my friends, is nothing less than what Joseph Campbell calls the Foundational Myth, the story of existence. I figured it out. I couldn’t believe it. I f*cking figured it out! And all this washed over me, wave after wave of next level understanding, after I’d lived through it bit by painful suspicious bit, as a single partaking unit of consciousness underneath the machine of life. I was the rower with the nagging scepsis. I taper down, and the three of us walk away into the night again. I’m dazed. My thoughts keep going back to that episode of just now. I turn to Dom and Gabe again, “Guys, five words, Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question” WOW! My head is still whizzing, Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts seem to be smiling down upon me. I could keep thinking about all this stuff forever! Humanity has been thinking about this stuff forever. “You should rewrite the Bible,” Dom comments. “I know!” And then I hear myself. The term ‘Jesus complex’ flashes through my mind. Oei, that’s enough. Bad things happen to people with that.

But Man, that was powerful. The human mind is a vast and wild, wild place. And all that triggered by a piece of art. I am astounded. What I find there, that night in Deep Playa, is a profound new appreciation of art. And a new understanding of what kind of art I love: the kind that invites engagement, interaction, play. Like all the art on the Playa. This, I realize, is how I think they meant for Burning Man to be experienced. This is where you go when you ‘go Deep Playa’. I’m there right now, this is the Playa state of mind, this is the flow.

The John Muir Trail

With all those magical moments and crazy sights in my pocket, far too many to document up against, and the night of the Eternal Return as the icing on the cake, my first Burning Man was a solid gold one. I’ll be chewing on all the impressions for a while to come.  But it didn’t stop there. We left right after the Temple Burn, driving through the night once again, with a pit stop at 8AM at Mono Lake, an ancient alkaline lake just like what the Black Rock Desert must once have looked like. (“Where are the neon lights? Oh I miss it already, I miss our dome,” goes Gabe.) We meet up with Gabe’s friend Naomi in Mammoth and spend the next week preparing for and backpacking the first section of the 200 mile long John Muir Trail. Miles is bagging the whole thing in three weeks’ time, from Yosemite Valley down to Mount Whitney. We’re here to send him off in style, hiking with him the first four days, from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows. What a beautiful, beautiful place. The sweet smell of the pine forests, the bear cans and our excellent backcountry meals, identifying Ponderosa and Lodge pole pines, Mountain Hemlock firs and Incense cedars, spotting deer and coyotes and sage grouse and a wide variety of chipmunks and squirrels. Reading the map, telling stories, reminiscing our Burning Man days, campfires, and swimming almost every day, in hot springs, lakes and rivers. This is the life.

We even climbed Half Dome, I, because I hadn’t thought to bring the right shoes, barefoot. Excellent decision. I had great grip on the almost vertical granite wall and it brought out that nimble little monkey in me which made it all so much less scary and so much more fun. And I received about 30 comments on the way up and back down again about my bare feet, and how bad-ass it was. I feel so grateful for my young fit body, and that the two of us together can feel so alive! Oh, what luck, to be able to put my newfound identity to practice so soon! I am a climber, I’ve been one all along. I just needed the environment and the people to bring it out again!

Find your tribe

Speaking of which… this still is one of the things I value most about my time here in California. I love backpacking. In fact I think it’s one of the things I love doing most. The stunning wild scenery, the feelings of adventure, accomplishment, attunement, calm… It is and always has been such a big part of who I am. But for many years now, with the lack of a tribe of like-minded people in this respect, it’s been pushed to the back burner. One thing I love about the Californians I know is their intimate connection with their outdoors. I’ve never been surrounded by people my own age who understood so well just how important nature is to me, and even know it better than I do. Many of my friends are ecology or plant science majors, knows lots of plant names, have their Wilderness First Responder certification, have instructed at summer camps, work at Outdoor Adventures on campus, have gone to tracking schools and wilderness survival programs and so forth. It’s so inspiring to me, and an old part of me is lit back up again. And the great thing is that it is transferrable. I can take this fire and experience and skills back home, and with my altered perception of distance and soon with my Californian driver license in my pocket, I can’t wait to explore more of Europe. It’s been such, such a good decision to stay longer. Last time I had only three months left, I would be overcome by feelings of claustrophobia and time pressure when I heard a plane passing over or counted my days. Now, I have actually started looking forward to all the great things I can do back in the Netherlands, all that’s waiting for me there if I take the trouble to find it! Now, I can actually see myself being ready to go home in three months!

Another related and greatly empowering thought is the knowledge of how FREE I am! I am graduated, untethered to anything or anyone, and I’m spending a year drinking in all this delicious colorful LIFE  in a distant land while my life back at home is undergoing a self-cleansing reboot, stripped to its bare essentials. When I come back, it’ll be free and open to build it up again exactly as I want. What a rare and fine set of circumstances. And what an extraordinary blessing to feel so clear about what I want.  I know exactly what social circles I want to fill my life with, that’ll rekindle and challenge parts in me that haven’t seen broad daylight in a long time. Agency! Turning towards different parts in me to continue becoming the well-rounded, self-actualized person that’s in my future! Oh, the potential! The possibilities! Oh, the joy of living! Oh! The places I’ll go!

So you see, I’m still a gleeful happy camper, with the wildest two weeks behind me to top off what may well have been the best summer of my life so far. And now, buckle up again, and settle down for the final bumpy ride! The last leg! Fall in Davis, in Bro-op turned Shakti-house Pierce co-op, with old friends, and new friends, with near and with far lands, I’m ready for this! To keep going, going, going! No point looking back too much, no point getting stuck in the muck or in some wonderful spot. I’ll make sure I’m well-fed, listen to all the important things said, but onwards I’ll be going, cause there’s so much ahead!

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy…

I had thought that by the time I would be sitting down to write about my summer in Davis, it would start with something like: ‘It is 100 degrees F outside, I am up on my loft, I can’t move and I’m drowning in a pool of my own sweat…’ But no. It took my body only a few weeks to adapt to the heat, and now, here in the quiet little summer town of Davis, I am in fact in the midst of living the most incredible summer of my life. Once you surrender to the slow pace and the sweat, this place is a little heaven on earth. For real.

The Domes

Home base this summer are the Domes, the magical fairytale community at Baggins End, where I’ve moved for these months. Fourteen white geodesic domes with two people in each, amidst a sea of fruit trees, stone pines, prickly pears, agaves and aloe vera. The Domes with their huge property, the community gardens right next door, and the neighborhood of Village Homes, are all overflowing with ripe fruit, far too much to eat and preserve up against. What a place of abundance! Even though I know the Domes well and had good friends who lived there during the school year, I once again felt that tingling excitement and empowering freedom of moving somewhere new, where every pathway leads into the unknown. Looking for someone here isn’t from door to door like in the co-ops, but like looking for someone in a jungle. And I so appreciate my dome mate, Lucas. Without having to waste any words on it, him and I have established a cozy little household. I have my chair, he has his, and we’ve become attuned to each other’s habits and routines. Quietly, he’s become a friend in a way I appreciate them most: in deed. When I finally, thankfully, found a Burning Man ticket, four days before the festival was to commence, he got up from his chair, said “Let’s go” and drove with me, for 11 hours, 450 miles, to Fort Bragg and back, to pick it up. With nothing in it for him, except perhaps the prospect of seeing the Northern Californian coast for the first time. When we got there, though, the whole coast was so fogged up we couldn’t see shit. No big deal, we had dinner and drove back. Such generosity impresses me greatly.

The secluded, overgrown Domes are a quiet summer refuge from the hectic Trico-op life, a chance to catch my breath, spend time by myself, and process and recover from all those intense learnings from the school year. The basic format of my life these days is simple: get up before it’s too hot, make a dank egg kale yogurt burrito for breakfast, play guitar on the chair outside my door on a few steps down on the sidewalk, go downtown for some errands, stop by the Trico-ops on the way back to hang out with friends, make lunch, eat it outside with a ginger ale and my guitar beside me, read my book, go to the daily delicious elaborate dinner that other people have cooked for me, hang out with the Domies, sleep. I love this slow paced living, where my senses get a chance to take in all the beauty around me. I feel  incredibly blessed, but also over sensitized from the Trico-ops, and have to keep reminding myself that I need personal space, solitude, time, and calm right now. But… though there is more privacy, with only one dome mate instead of 15 housemates, I did enter into a new intentional community. Scary at first, feeling things out, but before you know it you’ve sunk in and a new vibrant social life is taking shape around you. My calm default day plan quickly filled up: writing, making longboarding a new mode of transportation, volunteering at the bike collective, watching Holland’s world cup games with friends, climb trees, spending a lot of time with the few old friends left in town for summer, and with new friends amongst the summer Domies, organizing a dance party and the Domes Summer Festival, lots of fruit harvesting, baking, drying, canning… This is the life man. Wait! Yes, yes, personal space and calm, I know… But there’s so much fun to be had! It was hard to sit quiet this summer, and frankly I’m happy that I didn’t. I healed and recharged through adventures. And adventures I’ve had!

The Lost Coast

The Domes and Davis were only base camp for a ton of trips. My favorite possession is my road map of California, on which I’ve highlighted all the highways I’ve traveled. Man, I’ve been all over! Yosemite with Joe; Berkeley, Los Angeles, Camarillo, Pasadena with Jess, Josh, Doug, Lili, and Alex; San Francisco with Derk-Jan; the Lost Coast with Gordon and Cole; Mendocino with Efren; North Fork with Reggie, Kelsey and Lili; Fort Bragg with Lucas; Berkeley again with Trevor and Gordon; and now, to top it all off with the most incredible adventure of all: Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada, with Miles and Gabe! Oh boy… what a summer!

Let me tell you about one trip. A few weeks ago Gordon, Cole (two of my housemates and friends from Pierce) and I drove out to the Lost Coast in Humboldt for three days of camping and backpacking in the most incredible untamed wilderness you can imagine. When they built the famous Highway 1, which runs along the Pacific Ocean from North to South California, they were forced to divert the highway land inwards for one section because the forests and cliffs and mountains were too rugged to slash a highway through. Hence the name, the Lost Coast of California. We’d saved the biggest chunk of our route for the last day of backpacking. We are a good 5 hours of hiking into the day, down mountains, through forests, and out onto and along the shoreline, by the time we come upon the trailhead of the last leg of our journey. Tired and with quaking knees, we gaze up at Buck Creek Trail, a windy 5 mile long trail disappearing back up into the mountain forests, infamous for its steep grades along a climb of 3,300 feet. We look at each other before we start the ascent, “This is gonna be brutal guys.” Little did we know just how brutal. I quickly slip into a good rhythm. A steady pace, matched to my breath, an inhale and exhale for every two or four steps. Gordon follows right behind me, in the slip stream of my rhythm. He calls the water breaks where we wait for Cole, who proceeds at a slower pace. I am grateful for Gordon, because I don't want to think about breaks, I just want to feel my breath and stay in the pace. We keep this up for hours. But as we near the top of the ascent, I notice I’m starting to lose Gordon. Suddenly, I see Cole and Gordon drop their packs and sit down behind me on the trail. Alright, I guess we’re taking a break.. I wait for them, a little ways up, to get up again. Laboriously, they eventually do. I turn back to my rhythm and push on till I reach the top of the climb. I can’t feel my tiredness, I feel good. I feel like at this pace, I could keep going for hours more, because time falls away in it. Then I turn around. Gordon is no longer behind me. In fact, he nor Cole are nowhere to be seen. I wait. A few minutes later, Gordon appears from around the bend. He gait is faltering. Then, I see him stop and stoop over, leaning on his knees. Uh oh. He gets up again, catches up with me, drops his pack on the ground, lays down and falls asleep instantly. Cole reaches us and follows suit. Damn it, I’d hoped we could kill this last part in one go. Well, a break it is I guess. I let them sleep for 15 minutes. It is 6pm. “OK boys… let’s get going…”, I try. “Just a little longer Stephanie, just a little…” Cole looks like he can’t be moved, so I wait. At this point, I still think it’s funny, this skinny girl striding up the hill with two heaving guys behind her. A little while later, I carefully give it another try. “You know, I really think we’re very close, and I want to try to be back at the car before it gets dark. We’re really almost there.” I hope it’s true. “You know I hear you Stephanie, and I feel that. But I’m just completely zapped of energy right now.” I begin to realize it’s more serious than I thought. Surely we can’t stay the night here, without food or water… We have to get to that car. Cole asks for his flannel, then his sweater. He’s cooling off. I tell him to put on his long pants too. Gordon is still pretty much unresponsive. I get the stove out and cook up the very last bit of pasta, all the food we have left. Gordon wakes up, and suggest to make chai tea with our last teabag and the pasta water, and to finish our last beer. I give them the pasta, repack our packs, give the lighter one to Cole and my walking stick to Gordon. Finally, they get up. We fall in line, and I steadily start up the trail again, much slower this time, and glancing back repeatedly to see if we’re not losing anyone. Then the image comes to me of a rope of light. I grab one end with both fists in front of my stomach, and pull Gordon and Cole right on through to the end of the trail, which, thank God, is only half a mile away. We get to the sign post and hug, “Thank you for saving the crew Stef!” “Thank you.” The last mile back to the car we regain our spirit and talk about hamburgers and giant dinners. We reached the car safely, thankful for our bodies, our minds that tell us to just keep going, and for friends. Man, that was an experience. The pasta, the tea, the beer, the rope… It amazes me how resourceful people can get when in need. But I’m very happy we steered clear of danger this time. I think of my friends here who have a Wilderness First Responder certification. How good must it feel to not feel useless in emergency situations…

The next morning, back in Davis, I get up early and clomp down the stairs of my dome’s loft. My legs are sore, but I feel great. Young, strong, alive! I sit down behind my computer and crack down on an online traffic rules practice test for 40 minutes. Then I bust out of my dome and race over to the Davis Department of Motor Vehicles. Barely passing the test, I leave the building with a brand new learner’s permit in my pocket. $33 later, a whopping 1% of what it would cost me in the Netherlands, I can now drive a car with a co-driver until I feel ready to take the driver’s test for free. Finally, at 23, I’m all set to learn to drive. My mother’s favorite ‘lesson’ that she very explicitly tried to get into my brain was what she called ‘the art of deferred desire’. She taught me well. I am so ready for this now! I feel so grateful for this now! This is a great first step in becoming more equipped to help out friends in need. Just last night I was wishing I could drive us all back home again. I bike home feeling bad ass, blasting all versions of “I’m feeling good” on my iPod. I swerve around the corner of G Street to the Food Co-op and treat myself to my favorite food in town. On the terrace where it feels like an eternal summer vacation in southern France, I chomp down on a bomb ass Food Co-op sandwich, marble rye bread, brimming with fresh veggies and pesto mayo sauce. Man, taking charge of your life feels f*cking GOOD.

 

Out of the classroom, and onto the road - Cali summer is a time for wild adventures

I’m sitting at a desk in a white room with a fresh folded towel and a basket with soaps and shampoo on the bed next to me. I just got dropped off in Berkeley by fellow co-opers who were going surfing somewhere in the Bay today, and checked into the Greater Good Summer Institute for Educators. A six day conference about social-emotional learning and education, hosted by a Berkeley-based positive psychology research center that focuses on themes such as gratitude, intuition and empathy. The conference will commence in an hour, with a dinner “served by our award-winning staff”, and with it, my adult life. While I still feel like a fraud now, a fresh college graduate with no work experience to speak of, this conference should prep me pretty good for my next big venture: exploring the world of education, starting as a substitute summer teacher at an alternative education preschool in Davis.

Yosemite

But hold on a minute. I’ve barely been able to catch my breath after finishing college two weeks ago. I feel like I pretty much walked out of my last exam ever, straight into a range of wild adventures that took me to mountain ridges and Jacuzzis and underground clubs and beaches. Friday two weeks ago, the Domes hosted the last party of the year. In a haze of drunken dancing under a starry night sky and after a bewildered 4 mile solitary walk in the dark, I rolled into bed for the last time in my beloved old house filled with friends that feel like what I imagine siblings to feel like, now a barren abandoned  summer mess… Only to wake up 2 hours later, at 5AM, hoist my backpack onto my back and set off for the Amtrak train station with good old Joe. A good 12 hours, a train, two buses, three car rides and a ton of walking in the blazing Cali sun later, we finally start our real trip: hiking up the main valley of Mighty Old Yosemite, the ‘greatest of all special temples of Mother Earth’ according to Yosemite’s ‘discoverer’ John Muir. The rest of that long day we hike up a trail until our poor trembling legs just won’t take it anymore. With the majestic Half Dome ablaze in the setting sunlight, we throw together our dinner burritos and gulp down our ‘celebration beers’ with pathetically little energy  for celebration of any kind, huddle up in our sleeping bags by the side of the trail with the cold night breeze on our faces, and close our eyes, secretly hoping (me at least) to be visited by the black bear everyone was telling us about. The next morning we continue further uphill, wake ourselves up in an icy cold mountain stream, and for the first time in three years I get a chance to indulge in one of my secret little delights in life: digging my own little hole and taking my time for a good dump while enjoying some spectacular natural scenery. That day we hike for 8 hours, along the ridge enclosing Yosemite’s main valley, to the bare-rock North Dome and down on through forests with fluorescent lichens and thick pinecone carpets, until we reach our final destination for the day: Yosemite Falls.

We go to bed early, and with Joe already fast asleep I lie there for a long time taking in the perfection of sleeping in the wilderness: the refreshing nightly breeze, the pine needle bed, the rugged face of mountain cliffs, the silhouettes of sweet-scenting trees, the fiery color show of sunset that gradually lifts the blanket of day off of our planet and graces us for yet another night with a view into the grand nothingness of our cosmos, reminding us of our place in existence. Joe and I, Europeans astray, both agree that one of the many things to love about Californians and their land is how in touch they are with each other. The Californians we know – and that may well be a very biased sample, of course – love their nature and grew up trekking through it with their childhood friends. We’ve both come to realize that Europe is a damn tiny place, and resolved to seek out our own nature more, once back in the First World. The next morning we get up at 5AM again, and hike back down to the valley with the rising sun. ‘Yosemite is pretty,’ we thought, ‘but those Americans really do make a big deal out of it.’ But as we hike down the steep trail, we are greeted by a magnificent ray of sunlight bursting across Half Dome and into the grand valley, and looking to our left we see we are hiking down the full length of the 2,500 feet tall Yosemite Falls, launching off of the top of the valley and in dazzling freedom and magnitude cascading down a gigantic sheer granite wall. Alright John Muir, alright Americans, we’ll have to admit, this is indeed a breathtaking special temple of nature.

Los Angeles

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment – Hillaire Belloc. 9 days in LA, and me and travelling, after our long and rocky history together, have finally and fully reconnected. It is a powerful, magical, transformative thing to do, and I love it deeply.

Next on the planning was a bus ride all the way down to Los Angeles with Jessica, my theatrical colorful friend who I lived with in DSC in winter quarter. I would go straight from Yosemite to San Francisco, where I’d meet him. But I hadn’t managed to get a hold of him, and knowing him well enough, I was suspecting there would be no Jessica in SF once I’d get there. So on the way back up I changed my train ticket and travelled back to Davis with Joe. Back home. Just for a night. It was Joe’s last day in Davis, he would be leaving for good the following day, back to Scotland. For a little second there, I was reminded of that ominous sword of temporality hanging over my own head. I hadn’t felt it for a long time, too caught up in living the intense life I had been living in Davis the past months ever after I decided I was not ready to leave yet. ‘This will be me, in seven months,’ I thought. ‘Ultimately, there will be no escape. College is transient, the curtain will fall, and I will have to leave this precious place, and these priceless people.’ But I managed to push the thought away. I was heading into summer, with already a bunch of new adventures lined up for me, and as long as I’m going to be here, I’ll not deal with it just yet, and be grateful for the glorious opportunity to have the college dream be my present reality just a little longer.

I had been right about Jessica, and the next day him and I catch a ride to the Bay, where we spend the night visiting friend and fellow co-oper Isabel who’s living in the Berkeley student co-ops for the summer. Every time, Berkeley, you get me every time. What a wild and crazy place. Somehow out of all places I’ve been outside Davis, Berkeley is the best at lifting me out of my own little head and dropping me on the sidelines of my myopic little world for a while. It’s healthy, getting that brief outsider’s perspective, but every time I am also deeply grateful for Davis, for the manageable, benevolent little home that it is. At such a much smaller scale, it is much easier to connect to a place and the people at a personal level, and easier to make it feel real.

 At 11PM, we meet up with a guy who is moving all his belongings to Los Angeles that night, and join him in his moving truck for the long 6 hour drive taking us through the night, all the way to the City of Angels. What a ride. Each time I would open my eyes during that long doze, there would just be vast dark plains of nothingness to the left and right of me. The silhouette of a faraway mountain range and the occasional dome of hazy light, a city in the distance. The blindingly bright freeway snaking through it all over the edge of the horizon, and a big fat moon ahead and stars in the black sky. So much space in this enormous land. I think of little Holland a lot when I travel here. 5AM and we are there, in the capital of ‘SoCal’, Southern California. We’ve crossed that imaginary boundary where people don’t say “hella” anymore, speak with drawn out syllables and a fat “ae” accent, need cars to get anywhere, and aren’t as in touch with their deserts as the Northerners are with their forests – or so they claim up in ‘NorCal’. I’m not aware at the time that I’m in for a crazy 9 day rollercoaster ride that will take me friend-hopping to five different Davis friends, drowning in luxury, no time to plan anything, just go go go. It would end up being one of the best holidays in my life, the perfect balance of alone time and one-on-one friend time, and diversity and depth. All you need to do is surround yourself with some good people that you love, pick a good setting, and don’t plan anything else, and the adventure will come to you.

 The first two days are spent with Jessica, who leads me on into his high school days, visiting the movie theater where he worked for five years where everyone still greets him excitedly. We get our car towed, and after hours of trying to get it back and a fortune in fines later, wash that painful memory away with lots of margueritas and rum&coke, singing karaoke all night. The next day I find myself in a park in Hollywood, painting the set for Shakespeare in the Park. I love those random stints that find you in unplanned adventures. Then I take the train and relish the magic of spending time alone, on the road, for the first time in many months. Nothing like traversing new terrain alone, empty hands, full heart, the overwhelming sense of absolute freedom. Doug picks me up at the train station in Camarillo, and the next two days are spent in glorious abundance: sunsets over the rolling hills with orange groves and strawberry fields, night-time hot tubs and Belgian beer, surfing in the Pacific and swaying contentedly for the rest of the day with the waves of the ocean still in my body, and finally driving down together along the Pacific Coast Highway, every glance over my right shoulder a perfect postcard, back to Los Angeles. There, we meet up with Lili and dive into the mad merry-go-round of Venice Beach for an hour. An outdoor body-building gym on the beach boulevard, fortune telling stands, drifting druggies, street dancers, Native American spirituality shops, noise, dirt, one big exciting, enticing freak show.

We say bye to Doug and there we go, off to the next adventure. Lili takes me past her old house in Venice, and then we hit the freeway to Pasadena. Parents and brothers, Farmer’s Market and block party, s’mores and homemade carrot cake, strolling downtown and some quality analyzing of our co-op experience over coffee, hiking down into a canyon at day, and up to a hilltop at night, just melting together in such a beautiful deep soul connection overlooking bobbing city lights as far as the eye can reach. Our friendship is so pure and bright, so full of love, sharing our ecstatic passion for life. Lili is the realest thing I have here. She drives me back to LA, and I find Jessica again, my welcoming home base this whole trip. We swim in his dad’s pool and visit our dear Peter Pan friend Josh. We celebrate his 21^st birthday with him and all his childhood friends, and the next day I visit Alex at UCLA. Finding back old friendship on a stunning campus with wide stone stairs and gushing fountains and a Cambridge-meets-Alhambra architecture. Next day, an hour long bus drive and another hour long walk (all still in the same city, and not even covering half of it! This place is BIG), and I’m back at Jessica’s. After a night of clubbing with him, his dad and his coworkers, we find ourselves in the car of our friend Hank and driving back up again, during the day this time. The nothingness looked a lot more compelling in the dark.

Summer in Davis, winter in Pierce

After that flurry of overflowing hearts and palm trees everywhere I come home, dear sweet home, to the Tri co-operatives. Everyone is gone, the living room a mess, the bedrooms empty and overturned. Pierce is a quiet, dirty summer ruin of the life-filled home it was a mere two weeks ago. I want to get out of here. It’s a good thing I leave for Berkeley the next day.

The conference has started by now, it is 10:30PM and everything is quiet. For introductions, we were asked to bring a meaningful object with us and tell our fellow participants about it. In the benign, caring space that’s so purposefully being created with these strangers on the first day in this special place, I bring out the rose quartz that Doug cut off his collection all those months ago, in our first real conversation when we barely knew each other. Budding friendship, our hearts sending out feelers to test the waters. “I want to give this to you, to help you find your love”, he’d told me. At the time, I appreciated it as a beautiful and kind gesture, but not necessarily something I resonated with a lot. Now, however, I’m telling these strangers in a three minute flash what the people in Davis mean to me. With the rose quartz in my hand, and the empty bedrooms of Pierce in mind, I feel a sudden rush of clarity. Suddenly, I feel sad, missing all my friends, followed by a deep deep gratitude for the love I have found in Davis. I don’t know if it’s a California thing, or a Davis co-operatives thing, or just a thing of a few very unique individuals, but the hearts that have so readily opened themselves to me, and extended their love so generously, have touched me very deeply and have been a salve for my soul. My heart jerks when I think about having to leave this place eventually, but the knowledge that you can go anywhere in the world, with your open heart and empty hands, and found a new home, so easily and quickly, in the hearts of fellow human beings, is the most profound and beautiful piece of understanding that anchors me to this world.

My dearest Davis friends, I am so thankful for the love you’ve extended to my heart, and the deep contemplation you’ve engaged my mind in. You give me a new faith in humanity, a belief that I can find love and connection anywhere in the world. It is for you, all for you, that I’m staying in Davis twice as long as planned. I want your healing for just a little longer, root this newfound faith within me just a little deeper.

And while we're at it, I want to express my appreciation too, of course, for my friends back at home. I know that the flipside of extending my visa is making a statement towards my home country. But while a year abroad will undoubtedly thin out my friend group at home, I think it's only healthy. I hold you in a dear place in my heart, friends from the old life, and will come back, eventually, very grateful to those that will be there for me, while at the same time respecting that life is flux, and I would never want the river to stop flowing. Once again, I align with the universe. Existence and I take each other by the hand, and I let adventure come to me, unplanned.

The shifty line between the real and the seeming

Agents of the old life arrive

Four weeks into the quarter, MAMA came to visit me! A few months ago, the thought of having to receive someone here from back home made me claustrophobic. But by now, I was so ready to receive her. It made me so happy to think that when I will come back to the Netherlands, eventually, there will be some people who will somewhat understand what this place means to me. It was a wild week, I took her with me everywhere. To working on the Student Farm, to my hapkido class, to a party at our homes, on a hike with friends, to the weekly Farmer’s Market, to my favorite cafes…  I was very grateful to Spencer for sharing my mom with me. He took her on walks, and had a movie night with her in his home on J Street. It gave me the opportunity from time to time to go on a little solo adventure in my private Davis world, like in the olden days (last quarter); something I feel I rarely get a chance to nowadays. It was also a wild week because of who my mom is. The first day after her arrival, I was woken up at 7:30 in the morning, after a party night, because my mother wanted to practice her Taekwondo kicks on me. Dig this: me still half asleep, too staggered  to protest, holding a big pillow against my hip, with my mother taking it out on me in the early hours in the living room of my student co-op in California. How did I end up in this bizarre life? But man, you gotta appreciate the woman who raised you. She came in a great time of need, and I got to finally share all the things I hadn’t been able to share with anyone here with my graceful, wise, loving mother. Nothing like a mother’s listening ear, and a mother’s words of wisdom, and a mother’s fond embrace from a place of the deepest love and acceptance.

Shadow land

Having both her and Spencer over shed yet another new light on my life here. Both of them are so real to me. People I have invested so much of myself in, people who know the person they are in this long and deep relationship with. It made me think: what do all my relationships here mean? What can any relationship mean after a mere five months? Compared to my mother and Spencer, representatives from a world overseas with a dense network of deep-reaching roots, this place is like a shadow land. Erratic and unpredictable, because it’s so unknown. Do these people I call my friends really know me at all? Who knows they’ll turn their backs on me tomorrow, when they get to know me a little better and discover they haven’t been in a relationship with me, but with a projection of their own. All of a sudden, it felt like this big transformative process of mine was just me dabbling on the surface of a whole world that functioned perfectly without me. What does it all mean?

But then you take it one step further, and you realize this world is more real than anything else, because it is the present moment. The past is gone, nothing but memories, and the future mere illusions. Those are the real shadow lands. Perhaps my challenge here is to re-engage with this giant simulacrum, and make it as real to me as I can. To me, that means two things:

Taking ownership

I had an interesting conversation with an old friend of the community the other day. He had talked to me about the tall grass around the Trico-ops that needed to be mowed, but how no-one who actually lived in the Trico-ops was taking the initiative. A few days later, he showed up in our kitchen at eight in the morning, where I was waiting for him. We went outside and he handed me safety goggles and a weed whacker. When I asked him where to mow, he told me: “You tell me, it’s your garden!” He was exactly right. The problem with this place is its high turnover. To many of the residents here, the Trico-ops are an inherently transient place, a background setting to their tumultuous short college years. It’s not a home that they need to take proactive ownership of. But of course, we should. This is a very rare place, where we have extraordinary freedom to really make this space what we want it to be. It’s our privilege, not our burden. Some may disagree, but if anything, it’s our responsibility. I needed that little push, I feel like hadn’t been taking enough ownership of the Trico-ops, and of my life in a larger sense.

Simplifying & Prioritizing

When I was forced to partially divert my attention away from my life here when Spencer and mom arrived, I suddenly saw how I had been here when alone: maniacal. I had been so restless, always wanting more and more of it all, fluttering uncontrollably from moment to moment. I had been stretching myself so far, spreading myself so thin, that I felt I had disintegrated into many pieces, scattered widely, but shallowly, on the surface of this life. I had wanted to be a part of everything, everyone, everywhere is this wild beautiful world. Suddenly, when forced to take a step back, the whole social edifice I had constructed became too heavy to hold up. Suddenly, I felt a need for groundedness, knowing where I stand. I felt a desire to thin out my long list of projects and pursuits, and pay more attention to the few relationships that actually meant something more to me, with people who I felt had better sense of who they were dealing with, and that in knowing me I could rely on.

Spencer

I will need those people, that bit of realness, for when Spencer will be gone. This quarter has been crazy for me mostly for one big reason: my dealings with him. My whole life was whacked into a completely different course from the one it was on in the previous quarter. I had known, had felt it coming, and braced myself, but I had to live through it to come to understand what it meant.

My pure and undisturbed relationship with my own naked existence has thrown me into a new light here that was so refreshing, so empowering. To be alone in a foreign land… I drank in all the new colors and impressions like a baby. To craft a new life, and through it be reborn myself, has been deeply transformative. This was a deeply personal journey, where all my attention was on me and my existence. This process was not one to be interrupted, or shared. This was something I had to do alone.

But Spencer did not come here not to visit. He had come to stay for the rest of my journey, and become a part it. Spencer is such a big part of who I am, has reached so deep into my being, that there is no way of existing in a place and not sharing it with him. Back home, I happily shared my life with him, because he was an inherent part of it. But this new life has streamed in around me, in a perfect Stephanie-shape.

All of that wasn’t clear to me however. I didn’t understand why I had awaited Spencer’s arrival for all those months with great anxiety. Why I went into straight shellshock the moment I saw him. Why I felt such a great disconnection. Why I couldn’t reach through my wall, out to the man I love, even when I saw how he was being hurt by my withdrawal. I wasn’t ready yet to turn away from my new life here. I did not want to hurt him. I felt forced to make a choice I did not want to make.

I was eaten up by feelings of guilt at being unable to incorporate him into my profoundly inward process here. Yet he already was, here, undeniably. Awfully slowly I began to accept that this would not be a quarter so blissfully for me and me alone like the first one had been. But I was too slow, and too reluctant. The moment came where I was presented with the harsh consequences of my being pitted in between these two giant worlds. After a month and a half of these huge submerged forces had been tugging at us, turning the sea between us into a raging silent storm, Spencer sat me down and told me it looked like things would end here.

After that, like magic, it was as if the floodgates were opened again. All the feelings I had been numbed to stirred back to life and began to flow again. I was freed from my asphyxiation with a big blow, and gulped for air. Suddenly, all my attention, frantic and fragmented as it had been, was jerked back to a single focus point in all its intensity. Suddenly, it wasn’t hard at all to make a choice. In those dark nights that followed, this life seemed meaningless and bleak in comparison to the enormity and depth of the sacred sea between us. And then I finally realized there was a difference between loving Spencer, and pursuing my own path. While our paths were diverging, and we were for some reason unable to support each other with our presence on each of our paths, the sacred space between us was still so pure, so filled with love, so valuable to me. It made no sense to me to cut that off just because we all walk on windy roads. Asking him to let me go, and allowing him to go, had nothing to do with a change in the love between us. If anything, letting each other continue our own journeys felt like a most graceful act of purest love, totally in the spirit of our love how I’ve always known it. In the four weeks that followed, Spencer and I found each other back in full connection. The positivity of that process of letting each other go was so precious. Our eyes and hearts were so open, we were so mindful of our appreciation and admiration for each other. Last weekend we camped outside Auburn, overlooking a beautiful canyon with candles and a bottle of champagne. Here, our 2 ½ months long ongoing, ever-developing conversation culminated in a last ceremony of closure, appreciation, and celebration. He leaves this Saturday.

And then… I will be alone once more. And strangely, as much as I longed for it, and couldn’t sacrifice it before, I know it will now feel bewildering to have this whole world to myself again. My main process of growth has shifted to Spencer this quarter, and I suspect that transitioning back to that individual process will feel a little uncomfortable. It’s unbelievable how we can live such wildly distinct lives, in the same geographical location. We all live in separate realms, and we’re lucky to find someone who has some overlap with our experience. But, as I’ve witnessed in these past months, even as individuals we can switch entire dimensions. Humans are crazy.

I’m staying

There is one last thing to tell. The reason why I eventually found the patience to turn away from my personal journey and engage in deep work with Spencer, was because of this: I made up my mind to extend my visa for another six months. Especially with these last two and a half months given away to my process with Spencer, and not feeling like I’ve fully engaged with the people and places and experiences here in that time, I’ve realized I cannot leave just yet. . I am not done here. This place is doing too much for me. It challenges me, delivering me to reliance on nothing and no-one but myself. It empowers me, giving me the opportunity to prove to myself that I am very capable of taking my life into my own hands and making it a wonderful, powerful, engaging life I am grateful for living. It transforms me, with the warmth and high spirits of those zestful colorful Californians and their gorgeous land. And, as my uncle pointed out, it does something else I hadn’t realized yet myself: It is healing me. For as long as I can remember, I have looked for places and people where I would belong. Now, with the world of the student co-operatives, I feel I have found I way of living that I belong to. I am adding a few people to my inner circle of closest soul friends. And, alone as I stand in this beautiful bright life, I am finding out how to belong with myself.

In the coming six months, I will take on challenge 2.0: not just crafting a new life from scratch, but sticking with it, diving deeper, taking ownership. I can grow my new tender roots a little deeper, make this world a little more real to me, and see what that brings me. Also, I will take the plunge from the only conscious life I’ve ever known, the school life, into the world of work and adulthood. That plunge is one most people in my life stage fear and feel unprepared for, and I with them. I will initiate my working life by exploring the world of education: I am attending the Summer Institute for Educators at the Greater Good Science Institute in Berkeley, where I’ll come into contact with awesome people and cutting edge knowledge about social learning. I got a job as a substitute teacher at a preschool that grounds its child-centered education on the principle that children are wise and autonomous and innately eager to learn. And I went kayaking the other day with someone who works at the State Department of Education who has a whole range of awesome projects lined up and may be able to get me involved. I’m excited to take on this challenge 2.0 and prove to myself that I am as capable in this school-to-work transition as I’ve proven to be in other areas of life. Succeeding in that, by a measure concordant with my own values, will be another big step on my road to self-actualization.

I realized I had to stay when we were talking in my Sociology of Social Movements class about why it’s so often college students that participate in social movements. One theory says it’s because of their ‘biographical availability’: no spouse, no children, no job, no mortgage, they’re free as birds to put their entire lives on hold to pursue something awesome. That was it. I knew, This is the moment. I’m free! Whoo! I can’t believe it! It’s real! The first place I’ve ever been outside my home country where, even after a few weeks, I could actually really picture myself living for an extended period of time. I LOVE this place so much. The people, the nature, and their close connection. The language, the learning, the ease and love of life. The climate, the culture, the promise of this nursery of the future. At home in my new homeland for just a little longer!

Spring time in Davis

Davis, April 20, 2014

Spencer comes to town

March 22, 11pm. Spencer lands on Sacramento airport. A moment long anticipated, with mixed feelings. I was excited to have him back, my best friend and lover, someone who is always available to talk to, to give and receive the warmest love, and brings out the best in me. But I knew that his arrival would mean the end of the life as I’d known it here. The fluid, fanatical, undivided attention I had for my life in the co-ops would now have to be partly diverted to him. The easy, carefree life I’d been leading in a world in which I’d grown only young, shallow roots, would be penetrated by a representative of the old life: someone who, be it lovingly and happily on my part, bound me in so many ways. It had been so wonderful to myopically follow all my whims, flutter erratically to every scene and object that caught my eye, have no-one to rely on but myself. Now it was time to come back to earth, expand my consideration to include the wants and needs of another person once again, and re-open up to someone to share my full vulnerability. I was scared of it. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to merge two of such big worlds of mine. How I was going to divide my attention, when really I wanted to give my full attention to both. How I was going to hold on to the strong, independent self that had come to such fruition here in a world on its own. It was good that Spencer came on the first day of Spring Break. With that, I had a chance to give my private life, just me and the co-ops, closure as a completed and very successful Part I. I could be proud of myself. I had succeeded, with flying colors, in what I had wanted to come here for on my own: proving that I had the autonomy, the sure and firm self-awareness, and the positive disposition necessary to craft a whole new life, beautiful and worthwhile, with my own bare hands.

$pRiNg BrEaK!!!

Spring Break was spent catching up and recalibrating, while exploring the uncharted lands of central California. In our rented car, we drove up to Clearlake, a quiet water with rickety jetties reaching into the mists, on through an hour long windy rollercoaster road through Jackson State Park’s redwoods and spruces, until we reached the final frontier in Fort Bragg, and I got my first up-close glimpse of the Great Pacific! From Fort Bragg, we spent two days driving all the way down along the famous Highway 1, all along the coast, down to San Francisco. The scenery was breathtaking, wild untamed and rugged. It reminded me of Scotland. The truest rolling hills I’ve ever seen, so round they couldn’t be real, small wooden ocean towns, and rough cliffs and giant rocks protruding from the surf, guarding the coast of the Golden State. I love California. We rolled into the Bay City across the Golden Gate bridge, spent the day in Golden Gate Park, and met up for dinner with my dearest friends Lili and Ashley, our separate spring break wanderings crossing for the evening in a café in Berkeley Spencer used to frequent in his time. That night, once again, we hadn’t arranged for a place to sleep, so we found our way to Lothlorien, one of our sister co-ops in Berkeley, to see if we could crash there. What a trip that turned out to be! We got there in the dark, with rain pouring down so hard rivers were flowing down the steep streets. We climbed the hidden stairs to a giant mansion, little windows lit five stories tall, and met two figures on the porch. We shared their smoke until we’d befriended them enough so they would let us in, and opened the doors to a madhouse of murals,  extravagant characters, a red velvet dress and some dilated pupils, countless corridors and enormous living rooms. We were led up to one of their spare rooms, a narrow lair underneath a slanted roof, with nothing but a mattress and some cozy twinkly lights, scribbles and quotes from past guests covering the walls, and a bulging fish-eye window that gave us a watery view of the thousands of lights that lit up the nightly Bay Area. The end of the corridor that our room led on to took a sharp turn and continued across a small bridge a dizzying seventy feet above the ground out of the attic and into a circular tree house hugging a giant redwood that neighbored the house. I couldn’t believe where we’d ended up. I stared my eyes out, this was awesome! Back in Berkeley, home to the largest student cooperative in the country, 12 houses like these altogether, and no doubt of the craziest ones at that.

 Rolling hills in California's Central Valley

Our lair in Lothlorien

The next day we continued our journey down through Stanford until we reached our final destination, Santa Cruz, where we spent the last four days hanging out with my friends from Davis. We stayed at my good friend Miles’ double house, atop two small twin hills in the forests outside Santa Cruz, a welcoming home cluttered with dozens of unfinished home jobs and fix ups, telling the story of the family life lived here over the past decades. His brothers were home too, and the three of them were the sweetest, closest band of brothers I’ve ever met. Their mom cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for us, complete with turkey and appreciations. The head of the family, their big bearded father, fell in love with Spencer’s sharp mind. Miles took us and three other friends into the woods. That’s where I met my first old growth red wood, an ancient woody giant towering high over our little heads, charred up inside but still going strong, his rough spiraling bark an exhibit to the force with which he’d shot up out of the earth over the centuries. The rest of our Santa Cruz time was spent strolling through downtown, tidepooling and hanging out on the beach, going to an awesome awesome show (the Polish Ambassador & Saqi), climbing trees (my rediscovered passion, one of my favorite things to do now, together with biking and dancing), and driving, because that’s how you get around here. I’m so glad we got to get out of Davis for a week, got to see more of my gorgeous second homeland, and got to spend time together and with some of my best friends who have come to mean a lot to me over the course of my stay here. Perhaps it is the Californian zest, or perhaps the co-op community in Davis is a really biased sample, but the people that have become my friends here are so wonderful, so stoked about life, so open and loving. And Spencer only adds to that, and makes life here a little more real.

That's what I mean 

The gang in Santa Cruz

Painting is a process

Back in Davis, Part II started with my first official week in Pierce, the co-op next door. I had moved out of DSC two weeks before Spring Break already, because of issues with my lease, and since then my stuff had been all over the place, spread out across two houses. I never knew where anything was, and was constantly repacking and moving my toothbrush around. I loved it, that chaos fit my fluid self well, but after three weeks of that I was really ready to settle down again. But it wasn’t time for that yet, since I’d taken up the big project of painting my entire room.  Over the first weekend of spring quarter, I hid out in my room and painted and cleaned and taped and scrubbed for hours and hours for four days straight. Everything I did outside of my room, eating, peeing, partying, sleeping, felt like a painting break. I felt like I hardly saw anyone, and mostly I felt extremely liminal, the fourth week of chaos, of no homebase, and this time in a new house. I hadn’t expected to feel so homeless those first days in Pierce. I was moving in, after all, because I was friends with most of the guys there, and was super stoked to get to know all of the Piercians (14 in all) better. Yet having them as housemates was different. And then I remembered the other reason why I had moved into Pierce: because I’d caught myself settling down, and getting too comfortable in DSC. I had wanted to pull myself out of my comfort zone, put myself on the edge again, so I could keep exploring, and growing, and branching out. But I had just forgot about it, and not expected that moving in with the Piercians would place me that far out of my comfort zone at first. But that’s good. Not only was that move in line with my philosophy of what this life here is to me: one of fluidity, diversity, and novelty. It also meant answering to a call deep within me that’s been there for as long as I can remember. One Friday morning, outside on the grass over breakfast, a friend here asked me: “Are you a drifter? You seem friends with everybody, not really stuck in any cliques…” I thought about that for a while after. Yes, I guess I am a drifter. As long as I can remember, I have spent my social life drifting from friend group to friend group, never sticking around for longer than a year and a half at best. I feel like I’m always searching for ‘my people’ – I wrote about that earlier, and I remember talking about this with my therapist at the tender age of 11. Yet each time, after a while, I’ll find that the new group of friends I’ve landed in isn’t my social kin after all. Each time, I’ll retain one or two really good friends from that time and take off again. It’s taken me a long time to realize that this is not a bad thing, not just a movement out of lacking. Many times I’m happy as a drifter. I’m so happy I put so much effort into establishing myself here in the co-ops and in the larger community, that I kept exploring and found friends in many different places, instead of putting all my eggs in one basket. I’m happiest, as I wrote before, rolling from social scene into the next, doing my rounds, journeying from room to room, or party to party, over the span of an evening. I love that people know my name, and that I can get on my bike and think of five different places to go to see people I want to see. I love putting myself out there in the world, and it’s not just because I’m looking for family, it’s also because I simply love being out there.

My new room

“You’re a Piercian now”

That said, I also really value having a home, and the first week in Pierce, the last week in liminality, was lived in delicious and restless anticipation, getting ready for the next big torrent. I’m so, so happy I moved into Pierce. Three weeks into the quarter I can feel how I’m slowly, in between those smallest of moments and interactions, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the bathroom, carving out this new home space for myself. Pierce is a glorious home. It is a happy place. It is one filled with laughter and loudness. It’s dirty, it’s cluttered, and every other weekend we have to move all the stuff out of the living room, all our couches out on to the lawn, because we’re hosting another party. The boys are big and introverted, teaching me how to be affectionate friends without all the words, while the girls are loud and jubilant, keeping track of their periods on a fertility chart over the stairs and busting into the bathroom with comments like, “Who’s in there? Cole, is that you?!” “…” “Are you taking a shit Cole?” “…” “Okay, rock on dude!” Sure things are a little uncomfortable in the beginning, but what a wonderful group of people, welcoming me into their midst with an initiation ritual in my first house meeting, and comments like “You live here now! It’s so awesome!”, “Stef, you’re a Piercian now”, “Stephanie, we’re glad you moved in”, and “Welcome to the family”. My wonderful roommate, Tucker, waited patiently with all his possessions in piles of chaos on the landing for a week, complimenting me all the while on all my hard painting work, with comments like “This is my favorite color!” Oh man. And he mentioned me during Appreciations at the end of house meeting, saying “I appreciate Stephanie, because her punishment when she saw how I had turned our room into Bed Land (he barely managed to squeeze his queen-sized bedframe in there) was that she’s going to paint a mural in our room.”

Yes, moving into Pierce was an absolute master move. The dominant emotion now is hunger. Really only moving in a week after the quarter started, and having to divide my attention between Spencer and the co-ops now, I’m so hungry to bite into this life. A single second flash of lightning that has only just started to light up, is all this moment here in Pierce, and in the co-ops, and in Davis, will ever be. One second to live this experience and a lifetime to remember it. I’ll have to live it in slow motion, soak it up, gulp it down greedily, be here, with it.

Birthweek

The first week of the quarter was also half of my birthweek. A birthday was not enough to fit all my excitement into, and a single party not enough for all the celebration that needed to be done here. On my birthday itself I purposefully didn’t plan anything. That way every moment was a great surprise. And it was beautiful to see how, surrendering my birthday to friendship, Spencer, Lili, and Ashley filled it in for me. They kept finding me, throughout the day, for another little celebration. Lili and Ashley waking me up, a birthday breakfast on bed from Spencer, a picnic with Lili’s homemade ‘boterkoek’, singing for me over house dinner, and gathering some my favorite boys (my only +21 friends here) for a birthday shot and a drink in town. That Saturday a birthday party in Pierce, where my party buddy Gordon played a DJ set with “all of his Dutch songs” for me and Spencer, the last ones standing. Throughout the week I wore my green paper necklace so that every time I’d look down I’d be reminded that I was celebrating, and the people in the co-ops and Spencer knew that I was celebrating for a week, so every morning there’d be someone to recongratulate me. Good times.

Surrendering my birthday to friendship 

Spencer's BACK!

The rest of these first spring days were: running around campus bursting with excitement with a new friend looking for the best rooftop to watch a full lunar eclipse at midnight; new awesome courses (from hapkido to a Mexican muraling workshop and from learning about organic crop production on the Student Farm to Sociology of Social Movements); field trips to see murals in the Mission in San Francisco and to the juvenile detention center where we’ll be painting ours (intense, mindblowing experience, a whole story in itself); staring at my beautiful new painted room; wonderful moments of reconnection and rediscovery with Spencer; two to five person sleepovers in the tall wet grass under a hazy full moon in the field behind the Domes, another ‘intentional living community’ in our larger community of awesome radicals and a Hobbitland on the edge of campus that looks like you stepped straight into a fairytale; and, as always, the gazillion little moments and interactions that make this life here so full and vibrant, so dizzyingly acutely here, and make you fall in love with life so hard.